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Our tests were performed on a 2011 27-inch iMac at 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of RAM running OS X 10.8.1. If there is high demand for benchmarking other configurations, please let us know and we will do our best to accomodate requests. However, most Mac consumers will use the software to virtualize a recent version of Windows, so we have focused our benchmarking efforts on that configuration. Armed with the latest software from both companies, we can now take a look at how well Mac users can expect to run Windows in the coming year.īoth applications can virtualize a myriad of operating systems, including OS X, nearly all versions of Windows, and multiple Linux varieties. Just a few days later, Parallels Desktop 8, the primary competitor to Fusion in the consumer OS X virtualization market, launched.
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Last week, we benchmarked VMware Fusion 5 and found that it offered a consistent performance increase over its predecessor, Fusion 4.
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